Eco Warrior (17 page)

“Yeah. Sorry. I was hungry.”

I stared at the screen. The vessel was eight miles west. She was not coming our way. Merwin got to his feet and came over. He looked excited. “What is it?”

“It’s nothing. She’s not coming our way. We can go back to bed.”

“Where is she going?”

I looked at the screen again. “South.”

“Due south?”

“Yes. Looks like it.”

“So she’s going to the Antarctic then?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“There’s nowhere else to go if you’re heading south.”

“I suppose so.” I was ready to go back to bed.

“She must be another tanker, Alfred. She’s going to refuel the whaling ships.”

“What? No way. You can’t know that.”

“She must be, Alfred. Who else would be heading there?”

“
Lots
of ships: research vessels, icebreakers, the coast guard…”

Merwin shook his head. “Not now. Not right now. I know because I follow the marine news. There’s nobody heading to the Antarctic now. It must be another tanker that’s sneaking down there, hoping nobody will see her. We should go after her, Alfred.”

I shook my head. “No way. We probably couldn’t even catch her, and she’s probably not a tanker anyway.”

“But what if she is, Alfred?”

I shrugged. “There’s nothing we can do about it anyway.”

“Maybe there is, though.” Man, Merwin was determined.

“How? What could we possibly do?”

“I don’t know. But we won’t find out unless we try.”

“It’s crazy.”

“Maybe it’s crazy, but the Sea Shepherd Society is down there. And they’re saving whales. Maybe you have to be a little crazy to do that, but they’re doing it.”

I stared at the screen and sighed. The vessel was moving steadily, not fast. Maybe we could catch up to her, I wasn’t sure. It would take hours to find out. And all of that time, we’d be heading due south, which was exactly what Merwin wanted in the first place.

“What have we got to lose? What are we doing that’s so important we can’t follow her to see what she’s up to?”

He was right again. “Okay. We’ll try to get close enough to see what kind of vessel she is.”

“She’s a tanker. I can feel it in my gut.”

The moment we started our engine and began to chase the unknown vessel, she knew we were coming. She would know that because she’d see a little blinking dot on her radar that was now following her, very slowly getting closer. And that little dot was us.

If I were her, and saw another vessel coming after us, I’d change my course, and watch to see if my chaser changed course. That’s what I would expect this vessel to do, too, if she were a naval ship, or coast guard. But she never altered her course, nor her speed. Her behaviour was what you’d expect of a tanker, in fact—slow, steady, and unchanging. Tankers pick up speed and slow down very gradually. They don’t like to turn, and do it with great difficulty. I pointed these things out to Merwin just for his instruction. He didn’t need any convincing that she was a tanker.

But we were gaining on her at a painfully slow rate. After five hours at our top speed of twenty-one knots, we were still five miles behind, and couldn’t spot her through the binoculars yet, which was another indication she might be a tanker— heavy with oil and riding low in the water.

Another five hours later, I heard Merwin holler from the portal, where he had been leaning against the open hatch for hours, with the cold wind blowing in his face. “I see her! I see her! There she is!”

I went to the bottom of the ladder and looked up. “Let me see.”

Merwin climbed out to make room for me to come up. He was wearing the harness. I was surprised to feel how cold the air had become. We had been sailing south for ten hours, which meant we had come over two hundred miles closer to the Antarctic. Merwin’s face was pink with windburn, and his lips were blue. It was time for him to come inside. He handed me the binoculars, and I took a glance. As I scanned the line of the horizon I saw a bump. Focussing carefully, I could just make out the fat bridge of a tanker. Merwin’s gut feeling had been correct. I nodded my head. “Yup. There she is. Looks like a tanker to me.”

“I told you!”

“You were right.”

“It had to be. She’s on her way to refuel the whalers. We’ve got to stop her, Alfred.”

“Stop her? What are you talking about? We can’t stop her. That would be like an ant trying to stop an elephant.”

“Think of David and Goliath.”

“Okay, but we don’t have a slingshot that would put a dent in that hull. Besides, she’s carrying oil, don’t forget. The last thing we’d ever want to do is cause her to have an accident.”

“I know. That’s the whole reason tankers are not allowed below the 60-degree latitude line, because the Southern Ocean is a sanctuary, and an oil spill would be catastrophic. So she shouldn’t be going there. But that’s where she’s heading, Alfred. She’s going where she’s not allowed to go. Don’t you think that gives us the right to try and stop her?”

“I suppose so, but how?”

“I don’t know, but I don’t want to give up before we even try.”

We stood and stared at the horizon, where, without binoculars, the tanker was just a speck among ribbons of water. The sea was growing rougher. It was cold, and it looked ugly. I turned towards Merwin. He was shivering.

“Time to get inside and warm up,” I said.

“Nah, I’m good.”

No, he wasn’t. “Inside,” I said with a friendly tone. “Captain’s orders.”

He started to raise the binoculars. “I’m just going to…”

I grabbed his arm. He turned and looked at me with surprise.

“Get inside,” I said firmly. “That’s an order.” I reached my hand for the binoculars. He passed them to me and dropped his head.

“I’m sorry. Okay, I’ll get inside.”

I moved out of the way to let him climb in. Thank Heavens he did; I didn’t know what I would have done if he hadn’t.

Chapter Twenty-two

EVERY MILE SOUTH REALLY was a mile colder and more dangerous, and the change came quickly sailing near top speed, and not stopping, because the tanker never stopped. If we let her go out of radar range, we’d never find her again.

That meant we had to take turns sleeping, and keeping an eye on the ship. I decided to take first watch, and let Merwin sleep. Fortunately I didn’t have to argue with him about it because he fell asleep during supper. He was drinking soup out of a metal bowl, and crunching four-day-old bread when I heard the bowl rattle against the observation window. He must have been deeply exhausted because he fell asleep in the middle of a sentence, too. I put his pillow under his head, lifted his sleeping bag over him, and checked to see that his mouth was free of bread. That was easy to do because he slept with his mouth wide open. If he slept like that in the woods, he must have swallowed a lot of flies.

Over the next ten hours, with the current behind us, we travelled almost two hundred miles, and narrowed the distance between the tanker and us to two miles. She wasn’t very big, as tankers go, but was carrying plenty of oil to refuel the Japanese whaling fleet. The sun went down, and then, just a couple of hours later, it came right back up. As at the North Pole, the South Pole had twenty-four hours of sunlight on a summer’s day, and twenty-four hours of darkness on a winter’s day. We were still outside the Antarctic Circle, but close enough to experience short nights, and very cold air and water. I wondered if we would run into growlers, those treacherous chunks of ice that break off from icebergs and float just beneath the surface, invisible and deadly. We had hit several of them in the Arctic, and although the sub was designed to bounce when it struck something, rather than dent or crack, we all received bruises from being thrown around inside. I banged my mouth against the periscope one time, and put my teeth through my lip.

But we hadn’t sailed far enough south yet to run into growlers. We came upon something else though, or, I should say, it came upon us. It was travelling beside us and I didn’t even know it.

I was leaning against the hatch, watching the moon and stars, when there was a blast of air, and ocean spray in my face. I knew right away what it was. When the sun came up and turned the sea into a blazing carpet of orange, I saw a large blue whale swimming along beside us. Then I noticed that there were two: mother and baby. The baby was almost twice the size of the sub, so it wasn’t a newborn. The mother was twice as big as that.

They swam beside us for hours. They’d disappear for a while, and then come back. When the sun rose higher, I saw them up close, because they swam so near I could almost have reached over and touched them. I saw their eyes, and they saw me, and I knew that they were saying hello. I could feel it. So I said hello back. Then I brought Hollie out. He had seen whales before, and was fascinated by them, but I think the whales were even more fascinated by him. They stared at him with such intensity. And when he barked, the mother whale slapped her tail on the water. If that wasn’t a greeting, I didn’t know what was.

A few hours later, I was inside making tea when I heard Merwin stirring in the bow.

“What time is it?”

“Seven o’clock.”

“How long have I been sleeping?”

“About ten hours.”

“Wow, why didn’t you wake me?”

“There was no need to. Besides, you needed the sleep.”

“It’s so quiet and warm in here it’s easy to sleep.”

“I know. Do you want tea?”

“I’d kill for tea. Do you want me to make French toast?”

“That would be great. We have company.”

“We do? Who?”

“They’re outside.”

“They are? Who’s outside? Another ship?”

“Go take a look.”

Merwin wiped the sleep from his eyes, climbed the portal, and strapped on the harness. A few seconds later I heard him yell. “
Whales
! Oh, fantastic!”

Later, when we sat down for breakfast, Merwin spoke excitedly about the whales, and about Captain Watson. Whales were Merwin’s favourite animal, and the captain was his hero. “I believe that whales are the smartest and kindest creatures on the planet,” he said. “They’re way smarter than we are, and much kinder. They know that we kill them, and yet they still like us. It’s as if they’re waiting for us to grow up, to stop killing, and to live in peace.”

“Have you ever met Captain Watson?”

“Like you, I’ve seen him up close, but have never spoken with him. He’s a busy man, and doesn’t stay long in one place. There are many countries where he cannot go, or he’ll be thrown into jail. Especially in Japan, where they’d lock him up and probably throw away the key. They must really hate him there. He has devoted his whole life to saving whales and dolphins, and that has made him the number one enemy of the Japanese whaling industry. But he’s doing what nobody else has the guts to do. I admire him tremendously.”

Merwin kept talking, but I had gone for such a long time without sleep that it was getting hard to hold my head up. His voice started sounding like a radio in another room. With a belly full of French toast, I plopped down on my cot, and shut my eyes. I was asleep in seconds.

Merwin was under strict orders to wake me if there were any problems, or if he wasn’t sure what to do. The sub was cruising along at nearly top speed, and the engine was purring like a cat. I checked it before lying down just to make sure it wasn’t straining. Merwin was so impressed with the engine that he just stared at it and didn’t know what to say. I was very proud of it. All he had to do while I slept was watch the radar, keep an eye on the tanker, and make sure we didn’t get too close. He said, no problem, it was a piece of cake. I thanked him for a wonderful breakfast, and went to bed.

I fell into a deep sleep, and had strange dreams. That always happened when I ate too much. In one of my dreams there was a monster ahead of us. Merwin was there, too. We were travelling through a jungle, and we could hear the monster roar, but couldn’t see it, even though it was right in front of us. I kept trying to warn Merwin to watch out for it, but he was flipping French toast and whistling at Hollie. I woke from the dream in a half-wake state, and wasn’t sure where I was or what was going on. I could still hear the monster rumbling, even as I opened my eyes. How could that be when I was awake?

Suddenly, in a panic, I recognized the sound I was hearing, and knew where it was coming from. I sprang out of bed, and flew up the portal. There, in front of us, not more than seventy-five feet, was the stern of the tanker rising out of the water like an iron giant. She had cut her engines, and we were about to crash into her. How could this have happened? Where was Merwin?

I raced back inside and shut the engine. Then I pulled the wheel and swung to port as sharply as possible. The sub lost speed as it turned, but we couldn’t avoid striking the hull of the tanker lightly. It was just a bump, and did no damage to anyone, yet it made a lot of noise inside the sub. I saw Merwin’s head pop up from inside the stern, just before we hit.

“What’s up?” he said, when he saw me turn the wheel.

“Brace yourself!” I yelled, but we struck the hull before he had a chance to, and the collision knocked him off his feet. “What did we hit?” he called from the floor.